What Teralo is

Teralo is where a construction project's paperwork lives while the project is running. The drawings, the correspondence, the inspections, the permits, the claims and the programme all sit in one place, and so does the record of who submitted what, who approved it and when. That record is the point: on a job of any size the expensive arguments are almost never about the work, they are about what was agreed and when it was agreed.

It is built for the way construction actually works, which is several companies on one job rather than one company with several departments. A main contractor runs the project. Subcontractors and consultants take part in it. Everybody works in the same project without anybody having to give up control of their own data.

Two sides of a project

Every project has a host, the organisation that owns and configures it, and guests, the organisations invited to work on it. The host is usually the main contractor, the developer or the project manager. Guests are the subcontractors, consultants and suppliers.

The split is not a hierarchy of importance, it is a division of labour. Hosts own the project's setup: they decide which tools it uses, what the checklists say, who approves what and who can see what. Guests lodge work into it: permits, method statements, claims, safety data sheets, diary entries, inspections. Both sides read the same records.

Which side you are on is decided by your organisation, not by your account, and one account can be a host on its own projects and a guest on somebody else's. See Hosts and guests for what each side can do.

Organisations, projects and you

Your organisation is your company. Your projects are the jobs it is working on. You belong to an organisation, and through it to the projects you have been added to. See Organisations and projects.

Some parts of Teralo exist at both levels, which surprises people at first. Your organisation has a document library and so does each project; your organisation has a directory and so does each project. The pattern behind that is worth ten minutes early on, because it explains half the navigation: see Organisation level and project level.

What you can do is set by a template

You do not get a job title in Teralo, you get a permission template: a named bundle of permissions such as Site Manager, Document Controller, Subcontractor or View Only. The template decides which tools appear in your sidebar and what you can do inside them.

So if a tool you expected is missing, it is almost never broken. Either you are looking at a different project, or your template does not include it, and the fix is to ask the host. See How permissions work.

Nothing important happens without a trail

Anything that needs somebody's agreement runs through a workflow: a sequence of approvals, reviews and notifications defined once and reused. A permit is applied for, reviewed and released. A claim is submitted, assessed and certified. An inspection is carried out, and its failures are reviewed.

One engine runs all of it, which is why an approval looks and behaves the same whether you are approving a booking or a variation. See How approvals work.

Where Teralo runs

The same account works in a browser at app.teralo.co, in a desktop app for Windows and macOS, and in a mobile app for iOS and Android. The mobile app is the one that matters on site, because it keeps working with no signal and syncs when you are back in range. See The mobile app and Working offline.

Where to start

If you have just been invited to a project, read Your first week on a project. If you are setting a project up, start with Setting up your organisation.

Either way, two screens are worth learning properly because you will see them every day: the register, which is the shape almost every tool takes, and My Items, which is everything waiting on you. See Registers and the data table and My Items.